Where rainwater has trickled over the bare blocks clints it has created further little gullies across their surface known as karren. We have been left with a bizarre rocky landscape, scored with lines and riddled with holes and depressions. The rock remains bare as when limestone is eroded it produces very little soil for plants to grow. Peek into the cracks though and you will see some surprisingly lush mini oases.
While we are up here, gaze out over Malhamdale below. You will be able to see some of the span of Malham Cove stretching out and get a sense of just how this feature dominates the area. Carry along the limestone pavement moving away from the footpath where you joined it until you meet a drystone wall.
This is where you will pick up the path that heads down the hillside to your left. Walk down into the Cove with the drystone wall on your right. The footpath is stepped down alongside the drystone wall, with the Cove to your left.
When you reach the bottom follow the path to your left to go and have a good look up at the Cove. Gazing up at the sheer sides of the cove, you can almost feel a sense of vertigo at the scale and grandeur of this crescent-shaped sweep of cliff face.
Wordsworth wrote a sonnet about Malham Cove that captures something of the awe of seeing it in person:. It might not have been shaped by giants, but this is rather an enigmatic landform; there is still much uncertainty about how it formed.
Part of the explanation for the cove is that it is a dry waterfall. This means a waterfall created it, but there is no water here today. Between and million years ago earth movements here caused faults to develop. We are now standing over the Mid Craven Fault, and this created the steep slope in front of us. Jump forward to around 10, years ago the end of the last Ice Age and a river flowed down the Watlowes Valley and over this slope as a large waterfall.
Over time the force of the water in the waterfall gradually wore away the rock face it flowed over, eroding backwards from the fault line and creating the semi-circular shape in the cliff that we see today. However, a river and waterfall alone would have caused Malham Cove to retreat into a narrow gorge, not this wide crescent.
The cove is 70 metres high and its curved walls extend for metres. The precise nature of its formation is still debated, but the width of the Cove suggests that ice might have contributed to the cliff erosion during the height of the Ice Age. The Cove was potentially carved out by ice that slowly descended the cliff, plucking away great blocks of the limestone as it went.
This may not have been a single glacier, but an ice stream within a much larger ice sheet. So the ice carved out the rough wide sweep of cliff, and later it was further shaped by waterfalls, melt-water and the weathering of wind and rain. When the land thawed after the end of the ice age the water flowed underground instead, leaving the valley and waterfall dry.
Major storms occasionally caused water to overflow Malham Tarn, gurgle down the Watlowes Valley and create temporary waterfalls over Malham Cove. Early tourists to this curious landscape, like writer and vicar John Hutton in , were captivated by what they saw:.
Since such occurrences have been rare. Retrace your steps to where you descended the Cove and follow the footpath towards the village of Malham.
Stop just before the footpath joins Cove Road. Gaze across the valley to the opposite side and you may notice some funny indentations and ridges in some of the fields. These are medieval strip lynchets and are evidence that people once farmed the area. Lynchets are basically earth terraces.
It is thought they were formed as soil collected on the downslopes of fields that were ploughed for long periods of time, or that they were deliberately dug to create deeper soils for growing crops on the slopes. Here farmers grew barley and oats, and this continued right up until the nineteenth century. There are also the remains of a corn mill further down the valley.
The lynchets are yet another facet of the fascinating landscape we have encountered on this walk. From tarn to cove and beyond, this wondrous world within the Dales has been inspiring visitors for centuries. It is hardly surprising then that Warner Brothers decided this awesome environment would make an ideal location for the Harry Potter film.
The cove and its pavement are intriguing and almost other-worldly. This is all thanks to the limestone rock, which has been shaped over the millennia by earth movements, ice and water, creating a truly wizardly wonder. Leave the footpath and join Cove Road watching out for cars and bikes. Follow Cove Road through the town of Malham. As you begin to leave the town behind turn right into the Yorkshire Dales National Park visitor centre well worth a visit to learn more.
Your browser is out of date, and unsupported by this website. Please upgrade to the latest version to use this website. Malham Cove, topped with its weird and wonderful limestone pavement, is one of the most impressive natural features in Yorkshire, and a highlight of the Pennine Way. But put aside thoughts of clipboards, cagoules and soggy sandwiches. Traces of Iron age boundaries are still visible today. One hundred years ago, Malham was a place of mills and mines. Nowadays, hill farms and tourism are the main activities.
Malham Cove is a huge curving amphitheatre shaped cliff formation of limestone rock. The vertical face of the cliff is about feet high. The top of the cove is a large area of limestone pavement. Gordale Scar is a spectacular gorge, complete with waterfalls, cut right into the limestone hillside.
The gorge was produced by water from melting glaciers sometime over the last three million years. Gordale Scar is one of the highlights of a visit to Malham. Read more. The 70 metre ft high, gently curving cliff of white limestone has amazed visitors for centuries. Formed along the line of the Middle Craven Fault, it has been eroded backwards from the line of the fault by the action of water and ice over millions of years.
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